


quietude

by JadeClover



Series: broken, softer times [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Acute Senses, Autistic Haggar, Autistic Lotor, Child Lotor, Gen, Sensory Overload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-10 23:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12310335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeClover/pseuds/JadeClover
Summary: It is late. Haggar cannot focus, but Lotor cannot rest. From a moment of sympathy comes a realization, and through it, Haggar gains something important—an understanding.Never could she say she understood him. Not until now.





	quietude

**Author's Note:**

> This is the result of headcanons you can pry out of my cold, dead hands, an anecdote my mother told me about my own childhood, and a night of sleep-deprived spite-writing. Enjoy!
> 
> Additionally, I have no idea how to write children. Please forgive any inaccuracies. (Lotor is about the equivalent of three years old here. I say equivalent because I imagine that (half-)Alteans age at a different rate than humans.)

His fussing cuts like a blade through the quiet, an assault of noise against her ears, and it is only millennia of learned endurance that gives her the strength to withstand it—that, and the bitter reminder that this child is her self-accepted responsibility. With a grimace, she shifts to better reach around him ( _as he does like to sit in her lap while she works_ ), though it is almost impossible to concentrate with his noise in her ear. Over the past half-varga, her child's mood has devolved rapidly into a squall of wails and near-screams, sharp and shrill and far too close in proximity, though the latter is admittedly only her fault, and frustratingly enough—she has read about this—the sound seems to strike certain biological instincts within her, ones that bid her to _move, act, attend,_ all because he cries.  
  
_Crying._ He has inherited that habit from her, or so she has been told. Altean children would wail when needy or unhappy, and it is a common enough evolutionary trait but an uncommon denominator in his heritage. Galra cubs make a different sound, quieter but no less racked with misery, and while she knows her child is capable of producing it, she has only heard it from him a handful of times.  
  
Her own childhood is lost from her memory, and she knows very little of cubs—children—in general. Did she cry like this when she was small? ( _It is difficult to imagine ever being so._ ) Published texts and the gathered anecdotes of Galra parents have supplemented her knowledge—( _the research she turned to when she was at a loss for what to do with such a tiny, needy thing_ )—but they are of no help beyond the superficial. The biology of an Altean cuts a little too deeply in him for anything else to be able to explain his nature, but his Galra side in turn renders the Altean records of minimal use.  
  
He must simply be Lotor, it seems. A singular being, for good or for ill.  
  
In all their wisdom, though, the texts do say this: A child does not cry for no reason. It is a sound hypothesis when one considers the nature of living creatures—they are beings of logic at their twisting, organic hearts—but the maxim offers no help in soothing him ( _he only cries harder_ ), and it does nothing to explain _why_ he wails.  
  
No doubt encouraged by the genes of his father, Lotor has grown to a height at which curling in her lap has become cumbersome. Still, she allows it, as it is so much easier to supervise a curious toddler when he is content to tuck himself in her arms, but when he cries loud enough that her ears ache and her thoughts blur, it is not quite so tolerable. Nevertheless, he is her child and it is a comfort to him. She will not deny him that.  
  
( _What else will comfort him? How will she know?_ )  
  
By now it is second nature to manage the awkward art of reaching around him to her work, but Lotor is less content tonight, less inclined to make it easy. He alternates between burying his face in her chest, his shrill cries muffled by her robes, and pushing away with the strikes of tiny, harmless fists.  
  
She is not so inattentive a parent as to ignore him completely, but what can she do? He screams louder than she thought possible when she seeks to comfort with a touch ( _though several times he tried to pull her arm around him, only to shove it away a moment later_ ). He does not like her voice when she speaks to him, and he will not be soothed by any of the more innocuous trinkets at her workstation. It is late—perhaps he is tired. _Sleep, Lotor,_ she had whispered to him, as he does like to doze in her lap while she works, but he was not quelled.  
  
Perhaps instinct speaks to her too well in this; the sound of his constant distress leaves an uneasy twist in her gut. Or perhaps that is simply the _noise._  
  
She sets her tool back on the table, and the small click it makes is somehow as loud as his screams. Lotor leans against her now, his breath hitching almost like that Galran sound of distress, and... she knows her child. For all he is alien to her sometimes, _most_ times, she can tell this with ease—he is _exhausted,_ but he cannot rest.  
  
Is he ill?  
  
The thought of any illness in a child so experimental, so delicate ( _as his immune system is bound to be compromised after the lengths it took to engineer him_ ) has her skin prickling with misplaced danger-sense and the urge to take him to a specialized, quarantined subsection of her lab ( _the one specifically designed for managing his needs. His father has his own lab devoted to his health—why should Lotor not have the same?_ ).  
  
Drawing back enough to run her fingertips over his forehead, she brushes back the white fringe of his hair and he _shrieks_. He is not warm, not enough to worry about fever. She focuses—where his side rests against her front, not from his chest, as the organ is of the Altean design but in the Galran location, his heartbeat is quick, though that can easily be attributed to his distress. There is no anomaly in it.  
  
"What troubles you?" she asks again, as it is in her nature to ask aloud the questions that most need answering, but she should not have; he practically curls in on himself, a tiny fist bunching in her robes as he sobs. It is impossible to blame him; the sound of her voice is anathema to her as well, an aberrant interruption in the cries that drive _her_ to the edge of what she can stand.  
  
More than the cries, it is _everything_ —she can hear it all. Even the most silent parts of this ship are, under the surface, a tangle of hums and ticks and rattles, the machinery and systems holding this vessel together. This keenness is an effect of her Altean biology, as her erstwhile species could hear a whisper across a room, but that still does not explain why it is so _loud_ at times. Alteans are meant to be able to regulate it, to withstand an amount of input that would overload any Galra's mind. Lotor has inherited the strength of her senses; he can hear and recognize his father's tread almost before she can, before he enters a room, but—  
  
Blinking, she frowns. With brows drawn, she peers down and regards the white-haired crown of his head, bent as it is while he cries. A thought forms, holding her in place while she slowly appreciates the phrase _genetic inheritance_ , cross-references a litany of that which would easily bother _her_ , and once again recalls the parenting studies' slightly more delicately-worded conclusion that young children are fragile, new things that are generally unequipped to deal with _anything_.  
  
A moment of uncharacteristic sympathy and a kind of desperate realization—she almost reaches to touch him but stays her hand. It would only make him cry harder. He does not want her touch, no matter that he typically does, because now it would only hurt him.  
  
She cannot even whisper words of comfort, because everything—the sound her breath, the vibration of her chest, all that even before the sound of her voice—it will strike him like a brand, and it will _hurt_.  
  
( _She recalls..._ sound. _A voice when she did not want it, a touch she rejected, darkness and silence all she craved. But her lord responded; he went quiet, he let her be. He understood._ )  
  
Looking upon her child, it is as though she sees him for the first time. Her breath catches odd and tight in her chest, because this is _familiar. You are like me,_ she does not think, because she has never wanted that, never craved similarity, never suffered from being alone in her kind. Instead, her mind only whispers, _You are not so strange a creature after all,_ bright and clear enough that it may as well have been spoken aloud, but stifled to silence because she will not disturb her child.  
  
( _And because for all they think Lotor does not understand, he is well of an age that he would not appreciate being called_ strange.)  
  
Lotor leans into her again, seeming for another moment like he craves some form of comfort. Fitfully, he tucks closer, angling himself with all his weight and pressing his head against her chest. A small whine pulls from his throat. Almost unbidden, but not quite, she circles her arm around him, and she judged well—he does not react, the touch close enough to what he is used to that it does not disturb.  
  
There must be some to way to test this, to know for certain. Is this truly something she already understands? How can she find out without causing more pain...?  
  
Always, she forbids her child from climbing freely in her clothing, but this is an exception; she takes the outer cloak of her robes and drapes it around him. It could be a mistake. He could dislike the sensation of the fabric.  
  
Or he could find it a shelter, a shield against the outer world.  
  
His whine trails off into silence, then chokes back into sobs. Like this, she cannot see him—perhaps an error in the idea—but his slight weight against her shifts, leaning in bonelessly. With the only other sense remaining to her, she reaches out and reads in the nebula of his quintessence that some part of him, at least, is growing calmer, even if the rest is still coiled to painful tightness.  
  
That decides it.  
  
_Come with me, child,_ she thinks but does not say. _I can fix this._  
  
Rising from her workstation, she holds him close, his weight negligible with her strength though his size verges on awkward to carry. As expected, he cries again and pushes at her, but she must hold him if she is to be quick. She weaves her magic around them, around both of them, and they wind through space directly into Lotor's bedchamber.  
  
The wiring in this suite has been overhauled as a luxury, manipulated to allow input from psychic pulses. It takes only a thought to lower the lights to full dark, an extra mental nudge to coax the guide-lights down to nothing. Lotor has quieted enough that he ducks his head out of her robes and peers around, a familiar reaction when he appears somewhere new. Perhaps something about this room comforts him; he is strangely subdued while she places him on the bed.  
  
Around come the blankets, cloaking him, wrapping him tightly. With a nudge, she bids him to lie down and adds even more. She has dealt with the lights, she has provided what comfort she can. Nothing can be done for the sounds of the ship, but they are muted here compared to the cavernous halls of her lab.  
  
With her eyes brightened to compensate for near-total darkness, she crouches down beside his bed. Lotor has closed his eyes, going very still inside his cocoon of blankets. Soon, even the last lingering whimpers fade into silence.  
  
His drawn face is now reduced to a mere wrinkled brow, and he looks smaller somehow. He _is_ small, but she forgets it sometimes. Her child is loud in presence, and someday he will be just as great as his father hoped he would be, but for now he is small. He is _exhausted,_ and he is finally beginning to know peace.  
  
For a long while, she watches him. The bundle of blankets barely rises and falls with his breaths, and if she did not know better, she might think him asleep—but he is not. At last he opens his eyes.  
  
His weak phototransmitters barely produce enough light to pierce the gloom, but they are like tiny embers regardless. He watches her and she watches back, and slowly, he works one small arm out of the blankets to reach for her. She is just barely too far away, and the hand flops fruitlessly back onto the bed—but he is not bothered by the distance. She knows her child—he would rise and move closer if he was.  
  
In this silence, she is privy to a strange, new kind of understanding. She cannot bring herself to speak, to shape words out of tension and strain, and he will not either. It is, she has now realized, a familiar habit for both of them.  
  
( _How had she not seen this before?_ )  
  
Better not to bother with words. Better to be quiet.  
  
A sudden idea, and she turns, casting around with her dark-vision and searching with quintessence-sense until she realizes the toy is not _truly_ alive, for all Lotor sometimes acts like it is. She finds the plush creature on the floor and brings it to him. His eyes brighten—literally—and he reaches for it.  
  
As she watches him tuck the toy into his blankets, her hands curl into loose, shifting fists at her side. There are times, powerful ones, when she thinks she loves her child. ( _There are times when there is too much weight in that thought to bear._ ) But for all the ghosts of feeling that may have surfaced, never could she say she understood him. Not until now.  
  
This tenuous thread links them, and it changes nothing even as it changes everything.  
  
Kneeling back at Lotor's bedside, she rests her folded arms on the mattress. He clutches his toy, staring out into the darkness, and everything about him has calmed now, the sharp knots in his field of quintessence smoothed away. His eyelids droop, his grip on the toy slackening. It is far past time for him to sleep, and whether he wants to or not, he will amend that.  
  
With a small wiggle, he burrows deeper into his blankets, and she cannot linger. It is just a shade too sentimental to remain until he falls asleep—( _and she is trying to encourage independence in him besides_ )—but now that he is soothed, she does chance a small whisper.  
  
In the angled, accented syllables of Prime Galran ( _because he likes those sounds the best_ ), she whispers, "Sleep, Lotor."  
  
She is halfway to the door when she hears his tiny, sleepy voice: "M'kay."  
  
Lowering her gaze, she narrows her eyes, and she is gone before he can say anything more, or before she can say anything to him. She cannot bear to _feel_ anymore, not tonight. An odd realization to have—at least for her—but even now the echo of his cries still rings in her ears, and she is tired, too.  
  
Her work is still incomplete, laid out on the table in her lab, but she will not return, not until morning. She will stay close, keeping to the apartment she only inhabits for the sake of her child ( _as he needs the stability and space her personal quarters cannot provide_ ). Locating a holopad, she settles into an oddly plush chair—( _again, for Lotor's comfort; his father insisted_ )—and powers it on, though she cannot say what she plans to study, or if she means to do so at all. The violet glow of the screen itself seems to calm her, slotting her thoughts away into something closer to organization.  
  
That is enough. This is what she needs. It is a meditation all its own, letting her thoughts swirl and flow as they will while she idly opens and navigates the directories of her projects. She does not fully pay attention to them, and she allows this of herself, a rare moment of letting her stringent purpose relax.  
  
She will indulge herself with this—and for the rest of the night, most likely. With the presence of her sleeping child a small, glowing star in her quintessence-sense, she lets her mind slowly begin picking apart every nuance of ideas still strange to her, still foreign, for all they are suddenly so familiar. ( _Understanding. That is what it is._ ) Her finger stills over the directory of one of her more recent projects, but she scrolls on, does not tap it open, does not begin to read. There is no time for that, for business and for work.  
  
She has much to think about tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~in b4 canon punts this firmly into au territory~~


End file.
